Making citizens’ lives better – Συνέντευξη στο Harvard Law School Alumni Newsletter

Niki Kerameus LL.M. ’04 draws on her legal training as Greece’s Minister of the Interior

Greece’s Minister of the Interior, Niki Kerameus LL.M. ’04, has found her training as a lawyer to be invaluable in her political career. “When you’re in office, you’re called upon to make a large number of decisions, many of which have a legal dimension. And even though you are advised by legal counsel, having the experience and academic background of a lawyer enables you to navigate complex issues in a way that’s sound and in compliance with existing frameworks.”

Niki did not initially plan to enter politics. She earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in law at the University of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas) and came to the LL.M. program at HLS to enrich her understanding of common law approaches and to take advantage of the international environment. At HLS, she took courses in international arbitration and cross-registered for courses at Harvard Business School. “My studies helped me in so many ways: more rigorous legal reasoning; a different perspective after studying for five years in a civil law system; a valuable interaction with a variety of different fields — the list is long.”

After the LL.M., she practiced as a litigator at Cravath in New York and then with Kerameus & Partners in Athens. When the financial crisis hit Greece, Niki and others saw people in tremendous need and wanted to find a way to help. They realized that there were many companies who wanted to donate goods but didn’t know where to donate them. To address this disconnect, she and four colleagues founded Desmos, an NGO which aims to match surplus to need: “We went to companies or individuals who had goods or services to offer, and at the same time we documented the needs of NGOs or others offering social welfare services,” she explains. “It might be as small scale as a family donating a wheelchair they no longer need. Or a company that produces consumer goods might have a production run with slightly defective packaging that is not suitable for store shelves even though the product itself is perfectly fit for consumption.”

At the time, if a company chose to donate such a product rather than destroy it, the company would be taxed on the donation. Frustrated by this disincentive, Niki raised the issue with then-Prime Minister Antonis Samaras MBA ’76, whom she met at a Harvard Alumni Association event. “A law was indeed subsequently passed that provided an exemption from taxes when donating goods. A few years later, Prime Minister Samaras asked me to be a candidate in the upcoming elections. I was elected to the Hellenic Parliament in 2015.”

In 2019, Greece’s newly elected Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis AB ’90 MBA ’95, appointed Niki to serve as Minister of Education and Religious Affairs. In this role, she undertook a large number of reforms, starting with extending mandatory preschool to the age of four, creating a new curriculum for all children aged four to fifteen focusing on soft skills such as critical thinking and empathy, and introducing English as a mandatory foreign language course as of the age of four. The Ministry also upgraded and extended a system of “experimental schools,” entered through a lottery system, where new educational tools and curricular innovations, like teaching robotics to 4-year-olds, could be tested across a diverse range of students and a system of “model schools” for students of an extremely high academic standard, entered through a very challenging exam process. During her tenure, the Ministry established tougher academic standards for entry into universities and a program to encourage academic exchanges and other partnerships, such as dual and double degrees between Greek universities and leading U.S. universities. There was also a renewed focus on vocational training. “Greece has a number of professions that are in tremendous need in society today and that are very well-paid — such as programmers and renewable energy technicians — yet we don’t have enough people in them.”

When Mitsotakis was re-elected Prime Minister in 2023, he asked Niki to move into her current role as Minister of the Interior. In Greece, she explains, the Ministry of the Interior is responsible for the public sector as a whole — from oversight over all civil servants and public bodies to citizenship, elections, and the operations of municipalities and regions. Niki defines the Ministry’s mandate as “How do we make the lives of our citizens better?” Much of the focus, she adds, is on ensuring that the right person is in the right position: “For example, we recently passed legislation that sets much higher standards for the heads of public bodies, including the qualifications needed to apply for these positions and a skills test.”

Another ongoing initiative is the digitalization of public services, a project that Niki described in detail at a recent talk at the law school. “In the past, you had to hire lawyers to go from one ministry to another, just to find out who’s responsible for what,” she explains. “Now, the government has launched Mitos, a one-stop, AI-driven national public service website with easy-to-access, concrete information about more than 3,000 procedures, including renewing a passport, applying for a permit, becoming a teacher, making a correction on a forest map, and anything you can possibly imagine.” This year, for the first time, the digital transformation enabled Greek citizens living abroad to register electronically to vote by mail, without returning to the country.

Niki has found her work in public service to be incredibly rewarding while at the same time very challenging. “Most of the time, you’re confronted with difficulties and complex problems,” she notes, adding that it was extremely useful to have encountered really tough situations in the legal profession in three different countries before entering politics.

In addition to working with other Harvard graduates in the Greek government, she has been involved with the Harvard Alumni Association of Greece (elected as a member of the Board of Directors for several terms) and maintained strong connections with her LL.M. class through WhatsApp: “When I was practicing as a lawyer, I very often came across a need to find lawyers in different countries, and my first point of reference was my LL.M. group. It’s a common point of reference for our entire class – we have kept very close ties.”